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Abstract
The interest‐convergence principle proposes that change benefitting people and communities of color only occurs when those interests also benefit Whites. As newly transplanted Chicano/a residents of a state facing exponential growth of its Latino immigrant population, we have attempted to counter the efforts criminalizing members of our Latino/a community, and have witnessed attempts to do so through an alignment of interests between Latinos/as and Whites. In this article, we examine the current scholarship regarding interest‐convergence and present a counterstory of educational leadership and politics affecting our own community. We use the counterstory to particularize and problematize how critical race theory concepts operate in real‐world situations. Ultimately, the counterstory reveals that using interest‐convergences as a political strategy divorces activism from the foundational tenets of critical race theory, preventing discussions that center race and racism and distorting Bell's original notion of this principle. We argue that claiming this approach as the primary strategy for social change, negatively affects social justice goals. Our discussion section highlights three tensions that result from this misuse, and pushes critical race scholars to better understand that the concept of interest‐convergence carries its greatest impact towards social transformation when it remains directly linked to the foregrounding of race and racism.
Notes
1. The use of the label ‘undocumented residents’ is purposeful here. In order to counter the negative criminalization upon a group of people that is implied by the terms ‘illegal alien’ or ‘illegal immigrant’, we deliberately value the perseverance, dignity, and contributions this population makes to the United States by the use of this term.
2. We define Latino/as as persons born or who self‐identify as having familial connections to countries in Central or South America, or the Caribbean. In Utah, as in the rest of the US, the majority of those classified or self‐identified as Latino/a are Mexican or of Mexican heritage. See Perlich (Citation2004) for more on the Utah immigration context.
3. The Hernandez case involved Pete Hernandez, a Mexican American agricultural worker, who was convicted of murder by an all‐White jury. Hernandez's attorneys argued that the county in which he was tried had not had any people of color, and Mexican Americans in particular, seat on a jury in 25 years although Mexican Americans made up a significant portion of the population. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hernandez. Delgado (Citation2006) speaks to the Court's motives and rationale for this decision. It contradicts the view that the justices acted on moral grounds, but rather, were merely attempting to serve majority White interests.
4. ‘Are you awake?’
5. ‘Tell me, what happened?’
6. ‘I will tell you in a minute’.
7. ‘Everybody is fine. The little one…’.
8. Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) is a national student organization that was born out of the Chicano student movement in 1969 and today mostly consists of students that are US born and/or immigrant Latino/a students with roots in various Spanish‐speaking countries such as Peru, El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, and Mexico.
9. ‘Yes we can’, a term first coined by civil and human rights activist and co‐founder of the United Farmworkers of America union, Dr. Dolores Huerta.
10. ‘Young man, excuse me, but I can't talk very loud. I came tonight with this advice’.
11. ‘White people decide who I am – friend or enemy, worker or criminal’.
12. ‘I'm tired of this already’.
13. ‘But I think at the very least…’.
